The dimensions of Gamepark’s GP32 resemble those of the first Game Boy Advance, although the GP32 is slightly wider and taller. From there, however, you can see a major difference in screen resolution for its built-in LCD: 320 240 pixels compared to the Game Boy Advance’s 240 160 pixels. This leads to significantly sharper-looking games, emulators, and utilities on the GP32. Other than that, the GP32’s specifications (a 32-bit ARM9 RISC CPU, 8-MB SDRAM, and up to 128 MB on the aforementioned SMC) make it fairly powerful, at least compared to the GBA. However, please note that you’ll need to buy a Smart Media Card separately.

As for availability, that’s the tricky part. As we’ll lament later, the GP32 has very little commercial software support, so it’s not really worth stocking for many brick-and-mortar retail stores within North America. You’ll need to order online, and this means going outside the country to Hong Kong retailer Lik-Sang (http://www.lik-sang.com/) or searching carefully for an American retailer who actually sells the rare handheld. Expect to pay around $150 for the normal version and $200 or more for the frontlit, modified version.

One interesting part of the GP32 is that the processor defaults to 40 MHz, but the software can decide how fast it wants the machine to run, up to and over 100 MHz. This is probably one of the first times that you have such a large degree of control in a custom device, but note that overclocking has a direct effect on the battery life of the console. Some emulators allow you to set CPU speed to whatever you wish. The generally agreed sensible maximum is 133 MHz. There are even warnings in the instructions for a PC Engine (Turbografx) emulator that:

Be careful what you select and especially what you load. Although no one has created a deliberately malicious excessive-CPU-selection program for the portable, it’s possible. This would be another inadvisable hack that ranks right up there with the hardware-shredding trick of generating musical tones on the Commodore Amiga’s variable-speed floppy-disk drive.

In a related, but extremely hacktastic move, a very daring Netizen has opened up a GP32 and overclocked the hardware by increasing the CPU core voltage (http://www.cobbleware.com/gp32/gp32oc.html). This allows reliable overclocking up to 170 MHz. The online instructions go beyond this overclocking with the similarly insane experiment of replacing the 8 MB of RAM with a 32-MB memory chip (http://www.cobbleware.com/gp32/gp32ram.html).

While these are very impressive feats (the 32-MB memory chip installation involved soldering pins on the CPU that were 0.5 mm away from each other!), there’s not really much software taking advantage of either innovation, although the 32-MB trick could allow the loading of larger ROM files for emulators, providing the applications supported such a thing.

Interestingly, some homebrew GP32 coders have gone whole hog to create a modified operating system for the handheld. Wind-ups (http://www.wind-ups.net/) allows you to navigate via a file browser, easily copy programs from your PC to your GP32, set up neat-looking icons in configurations of your choice, specify custom backdrops, and check out GIFs with a picture viewer. Figure 2-3 shows a sample desktop.

Figure 2-3. The GP32’s Wind-ups OS

While this isn’t tremendously sophisticated—and the built-in OS already does a decent job of providing simple scrollable menus for loading programs with some similar functionality, with new official firmware, better graphics, and more options in the works—Wind-ups goes a step further by providing extra utilities. These include:

The GP32 has a fairly vibrant homebrew scene, with several original games and utilities. Because it’s easy to copy and run them, the barriers to entry are a lot lower than many other proprietary systems. This has led to a lot of creativity, especially for a machine with such a small user base. Here are some of the best homebrew games and utilities available:

Besides the games named here, there are plenty of other interesting public-domain (PD) titles being coded from scratch, most recently showcased in the 15 Days GP32 Coding Competition (http:// 207.44.176.77/~admin28/gp32emu/15days/) and the LlamaSoft-style goodies for both GP32 and Game Boy available as part of the PDRoms coding competition (http://pdroms.de/pdrc2-submissions.php).

Best of all, try GpKat (http://www.toxicbreakfast.com/tb/downloads.shtml), which has a single, genius purpose in mind:

Of course, no set of homebrew software would be complete without a Linux conversion. SourceForge hosts a project dedicated to putting Linux on the GP32 (http://sourceforge.net/projects/gp32linux). However, as of press time, it’s currently stalled at the stage of getting a working SMC driver working. Currently, there are only nonfunctional pre-alpha versions available.

As far as conversions go, many classic games have conversions to just about every exotic format out there. The same goes for high-quality emulators that can run freeware and PD ROMs from multiple computers and consoles. Why should the GP32 be any different? Here are some of the highlights: